WELCOME TO UTOPIA

ON A REMOTE ISLAND, A RICH FORMER EXECUTIVE AND HIS WIFE WAIT FOR THE WORLD TO END. THEY WANT OTHERS TO JOIN – BUT IT'S A ONE-WAY TRIP.
By Trent Dalton

Three reasons why the world can't end: my wife and daughters. Things I won't miss: eight-character passwords, four-digit pins and leaf-blowers; life's merry-go-round of small victories, the carrot-and-stick mystery of existence and "down, down, prices are down".

A bullying moonlit ocean wave slams the wall of my cabin, our 14m ­catamaran dips into a trough and a blue ink line slashes across my notepad. We are nine hours' hard night sail from the new world.

I sleep and dream of drowning. Before dawn I emerge above deck to find Steve Quinto at the ship's wheel, where I left him last night. Steve is a rich American businessman. He once owned an international airline, pioneered low-cost travel across the United States. Steve believes the world I know is in the second phase of certain self-destruction. "So you've found your way to us," he says. He nods to the horizon. Cloud and fog seem to shift at his command and the untouched, impenetrable west coast forest mountains of the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, rise out of the Pacific like monsters made of moss and vine.

Beyond those mountains is Steve's utopia, an 800ha living ark that he has spent the past eight of his 79 years creating, investing his life's fortune in the shipment of 300 tonnes of materials from around the world to the very edge of human existence. Paradise. Salvation. A new world for when the old one dies. He calls it Edenhope. Eden would have sufficed. "Soon you will meet Ona," Steve says. Ona is a girl. Ona is a beginning.

The catamaran anchors at a buoy floating off the shore of the tiny village of Tasmate, well off the tourist trail. Steve's wife of 46 years, Ruth Quinto, emerges from the galley, looks out to the village. Ruth speaks with a refined English accent. Ruth does not suffer fools and stubborn jar lids. "Almost home," she says.

The Tasmate locals greet Ruth with hugs. She brings them gifts of fruit and vegetable supplies from the long-distant town of Luganville where we first set out. Shirtless village kids smile wide, make cartwheels on a curving black sand beach running from a sheltered haven of sapphire blue water. Ruth picks 20 coconuts and loads them with my bag onto a heavy haul Kawasaki four-wheel all-terrain vehicle. The kids wave goodbye, their parents' faces grim and curious. The thin and ageing white ghost couple from deep in the forest have attracted another believer.

Ruth hands me a large silver bowl containing hundreds of baby tomatoes she bought from a Luganville market. She puts the Kawasaki into gear and motors into the heart of the forest, her husband sputtering behind her. We bounce and rock for almost an hour along a loose earth track that climbs up steep hills, skirting ridges that drop off into oblivion. A single baby tomato spills from the bowl. "Oh, you dropped one," Ruth says, panicked. She looks beneath her feet at the pedals. "Oh, there, I see it."

"You have found us at an extraordinary moment in our lives, as we make our transition."

In coming months Ruth and Steve will ­disconnect themselves totally from the civilised world. "You have found us at an extraordinary moment in our lives," Steve says. "As we make our transition." Ruth has left behind houses and cars and furniture and expensive ornaments and jewellery.

The errant baby tomato beneath her feet is more precious to her than any of it. "The world of man proceeds on a suicidal journey," she says. "We've turned all of life into a commodity. Everything has a price. Everything is for sale ... and it finally became impossible for us. We couldn't go on participating in it."

Ruth's skin and bone arms work the steering wheel and the vehicle cuts through a stunning avenue of tall lush forest tress. A mosquito buzzes by my right ear. Malaria and dengue fever have spread through these parts. Ruth has had malaria seven times, once so strong it infected her brain. "It tests me," she says.

We pass the first of Edenhope's sprawling fruit plantations alive with pineapples, pawpaws, pumpkins, oranges, figs and countless other fruits. "I long for Eden," she says. "To return to living totally within nature, with no more desire outside of that. No need to harm, or be at all destructive. And have loving family join us in honouring Creation."

There is, Steve estimates, room enough on the ark for 23 people to live comfortably. And Australians are welcome. Singles, couples, families, believers. All that's required is a $300 one way ticket from Brisbane to Luganville and a commitment that means forever.

You won't need a ticket home. There soon won't be one.
"We want quality, not quantity," says Steve. "We don't want people who are trying to escape themselves. We don't want damaged people. You'll have nowhere to go. You'll be out here and you'll have nothing else to face except yourself. So you better be all good with yourself. Once you've made the decision to leave the world behind there's no going back."

The turning track straightens to a clearing and there it is: the dream, Edenhope, a new world among the trees, a network of wooden bridges and paths and staircases weaving through manicured garden beds and rolling orchards with fruit trees in the hundreds and a kitchen hut and 10 octagonal bungalows made of high-end red hardwood timbers. The wondrous dreamscape includes wild blue flowers and bird of paradise plants and trees so big their root ­systems form houses of their own. There's a communal library; a warehouse filled with ­endless tools and hardware; a surgery stocked with enough medicines to last two decades.

The air is as clean as the river that the whole wondrous dreamscape has been set upon. Wild blue flowers and birds of paradise plants and trees so big their root systems form houses of their own. There's a communal library; a warehouse filled with endless tools and hardware; a surgery stocked with enough medicines to last two decades.

It's a staggering work of human endeavour. Steve brought an earthmover and a front-end loader here from Canada. He rallied workers, paid and paid for their services for eight years; organised thousands of nine-hour sailing journeys back and forth between civilisation and sanctuary, hauling floors and sacks of concrete and machinery and miscellaneous goods in preparation for the apocalypse. He walks to a patch of dirt in the centre of his village. "It started here," he says. "It was nothing but Ruth and I in two hammocks tied to trees."

Steve closes his eyes and breathes his home in deep through his thin chest. "This is the birth of a new species," he says. "This is the birth of beauty. This is the birth of dreams."

I won't understand it, he says, because I'm from The Paradigm. To connect to the dream I must first disconnect myself from The Paradigm which has enslaved me for 35 years on Earth. The Paradigm is ambition and greed and war and politics and Deal or No Deal and Coca-Cola and Big Mac meal deals and home mortgages and nine-to-five and the iPhone in my pocket. "You're not exposed to an awful lot because The Paradigm keeps shaping your education. It's really tough for anyone to resist The Paradigm. Few can. Very few people claw their way back from it."

He has secured a lease for this land from the Vanuatu government that he has paid in advance for up to 75 years. "What happens when the lease runs out?" I ask. He looks at me bemused. "There ain't gonna be anything left of this world," he says. "Twenty more years at the outside, that's all that's left for the end of the destruction of this world. Finished." The end isn't nigh. The end is here. "Oh yeah, we're in it," he says. "We're in the end of the world."

We've just passed the first part, purification. The second part will be judgment and execution. "We're in that phase but we're still at the top end where you don't see very much change; over the next 20 years you will see more things occur than you ever would have believed possible. It will reflect the cataclysmic time we have prepared for," Steve says. "The debt in the US is not even ­serviceable. There is no economic reality. Stock markets around the world are at record highs. Commodities are at record highs. Nobody ­realises we are living in hyper-inflation. Some men are making so much money they don't even know how to spend it. And the 99.5 per cent of everybody else is experiencing contraction. The whole of the western world is bankrupt. They're holding it together with glue and image but it will break shortly. It can't ­possibly survive what's happening. And then the major powers, when they lose control of their body politic, will resort to the only thing they have to express their power. You know what that is. This is the way the world ends."

The story is written. Financial collapse brings political collapse brings religious conflict. "Every major urban centre will turn to riot," he says. The world eats, fights, claws, betrays, shoots, stabs and burns its way to the end. While the people of Edenhope wait it out on the living ark at the unreachable edge of the Earth. "We're in a position where we could clothe, feed and shelter ourselves for the rest of our lives," Steve says.

There will be no lease costs because there will be no Vanuatu government. "You will see it," he says. "You're part of the witness group that will watch what is the most astounding period in the history of our species. And you will see it soon."

A young woman emerges from the forest. Long, flowing brown hair, a yellow sun dress. She walks barefoot along a pebble path but maybe she glides, floats like the yellow and black butterfly that seems to covet her right shoulder like a pirate's parrot. She walks straight towards me and wraps her arms around my neck, a long embrace from beyond the paradigm.

Who are you? How on Earth did you get here? "How do we find each other?" she says. "By coincidence. Like everyone."

Ona Drisoa will not kill a living thing, not even a stinging mosquito potentially infecting her with malaria. Ona Drisoa's skin is the colour of the flat white coffee I will not drink for six days. Ona Drisoa's default facial expression is profound and universal wonder.

She was raised in the wilderness of Canada, a Swiss mother, a Moroccan father. She might be 25 or 35 or 18. She embraces Steve for 30 seconds, then glides off into the forest again, arm in arm with Ruth.

"Ona is my daughter," says Steve. "She is my granddaughter. She is my sister. She is my mother." "I don't lie," he says. "If I need to keep something confidential I will. But I won't lie. I don't know how you managed to connect with us."

I was connected by a friend who was connected by a friend, an intrepid traveller who spent almost a month on the ark. Coincidence did the rest.

"We had decided several years ago that we would not share this experience with media," Steve says. "We don't need the exposure."

But a fact is a fact. Miracles should be shared. Ona does the impossible. Ona is between time and space and living and dying. Ona is magic.

We eat fruit and yams and wipe our bums with leaves. We pad through the forest thumbing foliage that could double as toilet paper. "Very young leaf," says Ruth, with Edwardian resonance. "That will be like silk." Our laughter echoes through the dappled sunlight forest.

No meat, no fish, no dairy. Boiled wild cabbage two meals a day. We find wild mushrooms and pick pawpaws and pumpkins and armfuls of wild cabbage that the bamboo kitchen hut cook, a local village woman, Katherine, boils into coconut milk and taro puddings and yam and banana stews that we spoon from leaves shaped like breakfast bowls. We sprinkle our food with sea salt scooped from Tasmate beach.

Two local village helpers in the sanctuary, Max and John, show me how to cut and shave coconut; how to crack open bush peanuts. Their arms are all muscle and machete scars. John has tattooed lines beneath his eyes. We speak of our loved ones. "I can't say your name so I call you Jimmy," John informs me in broken English. Jimmy doesn't mind. Jimmy likes John.

"Open up," says Ruth. I open my mouth and she shoves a spoonful of foul-tasting swamp-green liquid down my throat. She smiles warmly. "You will not get dengue fever."

We sleep and read and stare at things for 30-minute periods in silence. "What are you thinking about?" asks Ona out of nowhere. I'm thinking about my daughters swinging on that snake vine. Jimmy likes snake vines. Jimmy likes Edenhope.

In the library I read page 81 of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, where Conway reaches Shangri-La: "It was indeed a strange and half-incredible sight." I’m growing so attuned to nature and living things that I can't turn to page 82 for fear of squashing a dust mite.

Steve sits beneath a tree with roots like a submarine’s rudder. "Who was Stephen Quinto?" I ask him. He’s almost forgotten. I have a news article in my pocket that might remind him, dated August 18, 1985, from the Sun Sentinel newspaper of his former home state, Florida. It describes Steve’s supernova journey through high-stakes US business, when he created Northeastern International Airways, a pioneering low-fare airline with revenue that in three years swelled from $700,000 to $230 million. For a moment in 1984 Quinto’s airline boasted the highest load factor of any carrier in the US. This was a man Richard Branson came to for advice. A former United Airlines executive described Quinto as possessing "the instincts of a junkyard dog; one of the most tenacious men you’ll ever meet. If it is possible, he’ll find a way."

Quinto was a cigar-smoking, hard-living Miami-based tycoon with a past as colourful as his aircraft designs. He’d flown cargo planes on illegal shipping runs through South America and Africa and Europe. If someone needed a shipment of chillies moved discreetly overnight, he was your guy. A cargo of caged chooks, no problem. He’d been shot at, imprisoned and threatened by gangsters. By the time he started Northeastern out of every last dollar he and Ruth had to their names – about $200,000 – he had no fear of losing his shirt because he’d lost it so many times before. "Stephen Quinto spent his entire life searching for himself," Steve says. "Now he’s just ‘Steve’."

Northeastern was a victim of its success. He couldn’t find the planes to meet rapidly increasing load demands. The dizzying party ended as quickly as it began and Northeastern filed for bankruptcy in early 1985. "You’re dealing with cretins," he says. "They keep raising the ante so nobody can come in and challenge them. But about the same time, the big guy talked to me. He said, ‘This is not your game. This is my game. I’m taking the ship back from you.’ It was that simple. I moved out of the ship."

"When you say ‘the big guy'…"

"You know who I'm talking about. It was about 6am. We were in a house in Miami Beach on Allison Island. I'd just woken up and the voice came from everywhere. Everywhere. I'd never had such an experience in my life. At about 9am that morning, at the breakfast table, I said to Mum [Ruth]: ‘I'm finished with the airline business.' Her immediate comment: ‘Thank God.' Just like that. It was incredible."

But there was bark left in the junkyard dog. He would make a new fortune in colloidal silver - silver particles suspended in liquid, a new-age cure-all to boost immunity and curb infections. Steve's Florida-based company, Natural Immunogenics, owns more than 60 per cent of the North American colloidal silver market. Passion, obsession and dreams built Edenhope, but so did a 480ml bottle of liquid silver that retails for $49. His four sons manage the business today. He can communicate through email and telephone with his sons in Florida through a giant satellite dish he has erected at the top of Edenhope. But soon he will disconnect all communications.

The ark, once full, will make its final departure into the new world. They will pull the plug. They will live on raw fruit and edible plants. Steve will abandon contact with his sons, his grandchildren and their children to come.

He considers this for a moment. "Do not look back when you walk into the woods," he says. "It will be too painful to turn around."

Days meandering into nights. Nights into days. Time pressures don’t exist here. Great chunks of it are devoted to the smallest matters. A simple miscommunication about where someone would meet for a walk becomes a 15-minute thigh-slapping rumination on the wonders of happenstance. We sacrifice half an hour to discussing the ingredients of a dressing for an avocado salad. "I wonder if Shiam is a good cook?" Ona wonders.

Many have trialled the Edenhope experience. Steve and Ruth have welcomed believers, curious and true, from Australia, Norway, Italy, France, Germany and America. Shiam is a young and spiritual Indian man who has given his commitment to join Steve, Ruth and Ona as the fourth forever member of their great transition. A fifth, a young Greek man, has pledged his commitment to Steve and Ruth via email. Places on the ark are slowly filling.

By the kitchen fire at night we talk about death. When the time comes Ruth says she will simply walk into the forest and die. "I'm going to take something to tie myself up into a tree," she says. "You'll have to look up to find me."

The tattooed and muscular John taps my shoulder. "Jimmy!" he says. "I have riddle for you Jimmy." You are driving a bus with 20 seats and 18 passengers. You come to a bus stop where four people stand: an old lady with a cane; a heavily pregnant woman; your best friend; and the girl of your dreams. "You only have enough seats for two people, Jimmy," says John. "What do you do, Jimmy. What do you do?"

I try and fail to avert my eyes from Steve's carefree and dangling penis. Everybody's nude. Pure river water flows into the swimming hole and a perfect auburn afternoon sun shines upriver on the Edenhope inhabitants. Ruth rests naked on a smooth rock beneath the water surface; Ona spirals through the water like a seahorse.

I bring Ruth a towel and she grips my forearm as we climb over misshapen boulders toward the path leading back to our bungalows. Ruth's weary leg bones heave over rocks and streams. She takes deep breaths, pushes on valiantly. "It's good to get out of one's comfort zone," she says. "Did you ever do this with your grandmother?" she asks. My grandmother had polio and spent much of her life in a wheelchair. "Oh," she says. Ruth grips my arm, looks up and says in a soft, sincere tone: "I would like to have a grandson like you."

I return to the swimming hole to find Steve gazing down the river at Ona, who rests meditatively atop a giant circular white rock. Her bare chest arcs backward into some kind of ballet-meets-yoga-meets-escapology pose. "Isn't she beautiful," Steve says, mesmerised.

And it is at this moment, a brief flash in time and space and being, that the big guy speaks to me. My own personal big guy. He tells me it's all bullshit. He tells me there are no worlds but this one in the pit of my stomach. He's whispering to me, saying we men are beasts. We eat meat, rare and bloody. We belong in the animal pens of Tasmate village and everything we convince ourselves we are and everything we aspire to be can be undermined and rendered false by the sight of a woman's breasts. So maybe we truly are doomed.

Later, in the library, another notion comes to me. Steve is sitting on a reading chair talking about his parents. He was born in The Bronx, raised in Long Island. "My mum and my dad were galvanised by the Depression," he says. "During the war my father said to my mother, ‘When the war is over, I'm going to take you around the world'. Well, when the war was over, she died. I was 10." He thinks for a moment, some distant answer coming to him. "Life is an experience we're treated to for a very specific purpose. I'm living my purpose. I'm living it."

I put the notion to him. "Ona is Eve," I say. "This is Eden and Ona is your Eve."

He doesn't hesitate. "You're exactly right," he says.

He admires Ona as much for her commitment to nature as her commitment to Edenhope. Ona is a beginning at the end. "She's a young woman at the height of her blossoming," he says. "We still have to explore the situation of relationships. But we do so in a truly loving way. We have no expectations of each other, other than our absolute commitment to what we're doing together.

"So we share. We have no hierarchy. There is no leader. You might say I am responsible for making this happen. But it wasn't me. I was just the messenger. Whatever I'm given to do it's at the service of a cause far greater than my own."

"Really, Edenhope is all about kids," says Ruth. "And their future. Those who will grow up with all the dreams we held sacred. Our bodies have been ruined, we've abused them and live the results now. But these children will grow up with their senses intact, able to see, to hear, and live life consciously. It's so terribly important."

"We have done an abysmal thing to the Earth," says Steve. "That's why Ruth and I have devoted ourselves to ensuring that we can get some kids through this trial. We're going to protect our children from the paradigm."

On the porch of my bungalow I scribble lines in my spiral notepad. Jimmy is confused. Jimmy worries for Ona. Jimmy could murder a Four'N Twenty. Something makes me look up at the pebble path going past my bungalow. Nothing there. I go back to my notes. Jimmy misses home.

A soft voice from the forest: "Hello." Ona is standing on the path. She's laughing. We stroll through the nearest fruit grove. "I saw you look up," she says. "You were looking for me. You sensed me. That happens all the time in your world but you are too busy to notice."

She asks me about my wife and two girls. I ask about her family. "They don’t know I’m here," she says. She stops on the spot. "I will tell you a secret that I have not told Steve and Ruth," she says. "But I will tell them soon." She whispers it. It’s a secret that makes perfect sense, a revelation about her health, her past and her future that cuts to the heart of Edenhope, now and until the end of the world. She stares into my eyes and convinces me it’s truth.

"Can I write about it?" I ask.

"You can write about it," she says.

But soon she will send me a seven-page letter. It will be filled with vivid insights, poetic and powerful thoughts on what brought her to Edenhope and why she will stay to the end with Steve and Ruth, two people she loves with her heart and soul. Towards the end she will ask, "Please leave out what I have shared with you, as a person, about my journey to the edge of life ... but, yes, you may mention the now ongoing journey to the edge of life and that I am finding that what there is ... is not the end at all."

"Going home will be an act of faith"

Going home will be an act of faith. That the small wooden boat from Tasmate village with no life jackets or backup fuel or oars will make it four hours across open seas to a small village called Tassiriki. Faith that my end doesn't begin here. "A black Chinaman will be waiting for you in Tassiriki," says Ruth.

We will bounce for four hours in the back of the black Chinaman's ute with eight villagers, a basket of yams and pillows of bush peanuts, as he cuts through the thick centre of Espiritu Santo towards Luganville.

Ruth's Kawasaki drops me at the door of the Tasmate hut where I will overnight before setting off at 5am in darkness. She has arranged a mattress and blanket for me. She has arranged dinner – boiled wild cabbage. She hands me a bag of peanuts and four oranges for my journey. "Will you be OK?" she asks. Her love of living things extends even to journalists. Anyone would like a grandmother like her.

"Did you get something out of this?" she asks.

I tell her she opened my eyes. I tell her she's a beautiful human being. She smiles warmly and shrugs her shoulders suggesting she nor I won't be the ultimate judge of that. She puts the Kawasaki into gear and speeds back into the forest.

At 5am an endless road of moonlight shines across the Pacific Ocean towards the horizon. The village boat rocks in the water, its bow buzzing with thousands of mosquitoes. John and Max have come down to the beach to say goodbye.

As we sputter off, John raises an old cassette player. The reassuring voice of Bob Marley echoes across the water. "Don't worry, ‘bout a thing, cuz every little thing, gonna be all right." John dances on the beach. "Be safe Jimmy!" he hollers. We share a thumbs up.

John says there is only one answer to his riddle about the crowded bus. The answer is to let the old woman with the cane and the heavily pregnant woman on to the bus. If your best friend is truly that he will take your place at the driver's seat and allow you to hop off the bus and follow the girl of your dreams. Follow her all the way home, to runny noses and mortgages and jaffle makers and four-digit pins and Vick's VapoRub and frozen peas and stop, drop and go. All the way to your perfect world, your beloved paradigm.